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Luca Cordero di Montezemolo and I agree: The Ferrari 348 is one of the worst cars ever to wear the storied Prancing Horse badge. I’ve hated the 348 ever since one tried to kill me midway through a corner on a winding two-lane across Salisbury Plain in the early 1990s. The Ferrari chairman actually bought one before he rejoined the company in 1991 (he’d previously run the Ferrari F1 team for Enzo between 1973 and 1977), and has never forgotten losing a traffic light drag race in it to a guy in a Golf GTi.

One of the first things Montezemolo did as newly minted Ferrari CEO was order wholesale changes to the 348. The 355 that replaced it was a vastly improved vehicle in every respect, and you can trace a direct line, in terms of improvements in performance, handling, durability, and driveability, from that car to today’s 458 Italia, the finest mid-engine sports car in the world right now.

If you want to understand how dramatically Luca Montezemolo has changed Ferrari in his 20 years at the helm of the company, the transformation from 348 to 458 is an apt metaphor. Enzo might have created the Ferrari legend, but it’s Luca, born into an aristocratic family the year the company was founded, who’s made the legend real.

“Ferrari was not in bad condition,” says Montezemolo, who was asked by Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli to head up the company. “But after Enzo died, it lost the ability to innovate and look ahead.”

When Luca took over, Ferrari was building two basically similar sports cars, the 348 and the Testarossa, in relatively small numbers in a factory that was still little more than a bunch of glorified workshops. “I guess Enzo is like a god, but all that stuff about Italian craftsmanship is horseshit,” ZZ Top drummer and Ferrari collector Frank Beard is quoted as saying. “They were just a bunch of communists banging out cars to fund the racing, and they didn’t give a shit about the road cars.”

They do now. In the 20 years Montezemolo has been running Ferrari, its revenue has gone from 230 million euro in 1993 to 2 billion euro, and what was once a company bleeding ink as red as its F1 racers made 300 million euro profit this year. While some 40 million euro of that profit comes from Ferrari’s global merchandising business, Montezemolo knows it’s the cars that are the core of the company, and so he ensures 17 to 20 percent of turnover is invested in R&D every year. (The F1 budget? That’s a secret.)

Ferrari’s famous Maranello headquarters now looks more like a Google campus than a car factory, peppered with architect-designed buildings nestled among thousands of trees. There are even trees inside the final assembly hall, a light, airy glass-walled building where more than 7000 new Ferraris — eight-cylinder 458 Italias and Californias and 12-cylinder 599s and FFs — were built this year on gleaming, high-tech assembly lines that match anything you would see in the very best German or Japanese plants.

Frank Beard would probably still think Ferrari workers are a bunch of communists, as they get free schoolbooks for their kids, free medical checkups for their families, free child care, and a special home mortgage rate — all courtesy of the company. But this isn’t the result of union strong-arming: These benefits have been instigated by Montezemolo. That Ferrari has been named “Best Workplace in Europe” by London’s influential Financial Times is, he says, his proudest achievement.

So what about the next 20 years? “I tell my people we don’t sell a car; we sell a dream,” he says. “But there are three things that define a Ferrari: the emotion of driving, extreme performance, and beauty of design. There will always be at least 7000 people in the world who will want to buy this.”